Junior Brides in Junior Novels: Teen Wedding Dreams and Female Agency in Postwar American Girls' Fiction

From the early 1940s to the late 1960s, junior novels for girls enjoyed tremendous popularity. These novels were, Anne Scott MacLeod writes, "like letters from another country where the climate is milder and the road to maturity less stony" (49). While the road may have been less stony, it was certainly straighter and narrower: the preoccupations of many of these books—dances, dresses, soda shops, and cute, clean-cut boys—make the lives of its middle-class white heroines seem painfully claustrophobic. At the time, many critics denounced such books with epithets including "sugar puff," "antiseptic," "sweet syrup," "ersatz," and "inconsequential" (qtd. in Thompson 375).

Yet although they bear very little resemblance to the young adult literature that grew out of the mid-1960s, when the emphasis was, increasingly, on family trauma, sexual desire, and social upheaval, junior novels were not, recent scholarship makes clear, quite as narrow or "sugar puff" as they first seem. Amanda K. Allen suggests that Mary Stolz's novels in particular gesture toward "a surprising female-focused alternative to patriarchy" and that Seventeenth Summer author Maureen Daly had many male fans, challenging the common conception of junior novels being only for girls ("Charm the Boys" 2; "Dear Miss Daly" 24). Moreover, it is worth noting that the genre of junior novels is far from codified, and our concept of them today is different from past perceptions. Some junior novels, particularly those by Maureen Daly and Mary Stolz and, to some extent, Betty Cavanna and Jean Nielsen, were considered by librarians and editors to be particularly strong examples of the form, in part because they dealt with more complex themes of adolescent estrangement. Series fiction by Rosamond du Jardin, Janet Lambert, and Leonora Mattingly Weber were often considered lower in the hierarchy and may not always have been considered junior novels, although they are generally classified as such today.¹

Even as it is clear that the junior novel for girls is not monolithic, many are imbued with what Linda Christian-Smith calls "a confidence and certainty over the stability of gender relations that belies the actual historical context of the times" (389). In the postwar period, as historian Elaine Tyler May observes, there were many anxieties about perceived internal dangers, including family disruption, communist takeover, and emancipated women (9). She argues that to combat these dangers, politicians and other leaders promoted codes of conduct and enacted legislation that would act as fortifications against them—a kind of domestic containment that served as a corollary to the broader U.S. policy of communist containment around the world. Early—but not rashly early—marriage and family rearing became important work on the home front. Far from signaling the end of the maturation process, an early marriage might now be seen as a part of growing up, and wedding planning for young girls was one way to ensure a seamless transition from bobby sox to bridal gown. The postwar notion that it was desirable for women to marry young and that wedding planning was a key component of young women's happiness was reflected and promoted in a wide variety of texts and products available to teen girls at the time, including romance comics, fan magazines such as Photoplay, advice books, in coverage of teenage celebrity weddings (such as Elizabeth Taylor)—and in some junior novels.²

For this article, I have specifically selected books, which I refer to as "junior wedding novels," that make weddings and wedding planning their central thematic concern. While this is by no means a representative sampling of all junior novels, the sheer number that focus on youthful, often teenage, weddings is worth observing. Notably, these books were published between 1949 and 1963, just as the lavish white wedding was becoming a cultural mainstay³ and when teen marriages were on the rise: indeed, within the cohort born between 1935 and 1939, 51.3 percent of women were married by age 20 ("Number, Timing" 3).⁴ Unsurprisingly, all protagonists conform to white, middle-class notions of "the good girl," featuring...